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Dvorak Says MS Should Buy Opera
patro writes "Should MS beef up cranky old Internet Explorer for today's standards? Dvorak thinks buying Opera would be a smarter move. It works on all the major platforms including the Mac which IE won't support anymore and $400 million for it is pocket money for Microsoft."
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!
(filler text to get around message filters)
...Dvorak is a hack...so, there you have it.
Last week everyone thought Opera was being bought by Google. So now its obvious that MS should buy it first to keep it out of the hands of Google.
Microsoft doesn't want their stuff to work on all other platforms... After all, they intentionally discontinued work on IE for mac, and have bought several companies only to immediately axe their Linux offerings.
Microsoft is not a company selling apps, Microsoft is a company selling lock-in. As long as customers are sticking with them, they don't really need to spend "pocket change" to keep up with technology.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Wow! That's the best idea I've ever heard. There should be absolutely no problems shoehorning it into Vista by next year. Way to go, Dvorak! You deserve a raise!
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Then after the "MS Opera" release, firefox would have even less competition.
Dvorak has apparently forgotten all the work that Microsoft put into stuffing Internet Explorer and its components into every unlikely corner of the Windows operating systems. You can't just easily rip that out and replace it with a new browser..
Opera can be uninstalled.
He's just another utterly clueless pundit. To have them buy Opera is to admit that they didn't have what it takes to secure and extend the thing. MS flatly won't be inclined to do that if they can help it- this suggestion is in the same class as saying MS ought to do a Linux version of MS Office.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Unlikely. Opera isn't compatible with Microsoft's business strategy since it implements web standards.
1. Write some code 2. Slip Dvorak some free booze 3. Get bought by Microsoft for "pocket change" 4. Move to Grand Cayman
Ehh...this is the life we chose.
Microsoft doesn't want a very nice UI for the web unless they control it. If the standards supported a nice neat replacement for your typical win32 gui then Microsoft is pretty much out of business as they currently stand. It's inevitable that the web GUI encroaches on win32 GUI applitions hence why MS is getting more and more into online services. The writing is on the wall and they'll resist the writing as long as possible - which means a crippled IE with lagging features for all of us.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Why does Dvorak even make it on here? I'm not trying to troll, just noticing that every Dvorak post made is a HUGE flamewar against his ignorance in computing. I mean, sure, he can have his opinion. But why does it make slashdot EVERY single time he makes a comment?
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
He could be their mascot, and beat up the Linux penguin and the Mac... whatever the hell that thing is in the Mac logo.
Microsoft already covered this when they based IE on Mosaic years ago. Mosaic used to run on more platforms. They could just take the Opera code base and do the same thing they did with Mosaic, knee-cap and labotomize it.
Seriously though, I think it's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. I don't see why MS should want to sink so much money into something that they already have and don't really make money on anyway. It may be pocket change for MS at this point, but that doesn't mean they should throw their pocket change in the gutter. The future not incredibly rosey for this point, they need better planning than to buy someone elses product that does the same thing as something they already have. You may not like IE, but it's good enough for the majority of users. I'm not trying to evangelize MS BTW, I'm writing this message through Firefox.
I disassembled it for you:
NOP
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NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
NOP
Fascinating, and, oh, look! Dvorak is little endian!
Opera has (had?) some great developers. They don't get the credit they deserve for innovation
Now THERE you're really hitting the point, but not even completely. It's not just their innovating new features, but the performance they're able to achieve with their application. The speed and memory requirements are fantastic compared to everything else out there. IE and FF can't touch Opera for memory usage OR speed (in most cases).
I just wish it's renderer was better; it produces goofy results too often. I'd like to see them take the Gecko renderer and run it through the Opera-resource-debigulator(tm) and use that in Opera. I'd also like them to make an email client that doesn't require 30Meg of RAM, and actually performs at a reasonable speed. Ugh. Let's hope Thunderbird 1.5 is a big improvement in the performance arena, though I have no hope it'll be anything other than worse in the resource requirements arena.
Extract of a chat with Jon held earlier this year:
Q: Hi I've been using opera from Opera 4 . And after four years I still have it - in fact I can't live without it! If Bill Gates wanted to buy Opera, do you accept it ?
Jon S. von Tetzchner: Hi Shima, thank you for using the best browser year after year! The answer to your question is simple: No. We would never sell Opera to Microsoft in a million years. Best regards, Jon.
Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm an Opera fanboi! What's it to ya?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
As usual, Dvorak's knowledge of the topic at hand is shallow and his conclusions are simplistic and short sighted.
Microsoft is not interesting in gaining browser market share outside of the Windows platform. Sure, they might be able to steer more people toward MSN and thereby make more in advertising revenue, but how much more? If 90% of the market already uses Windows, and gaining that extra 10% is fairly difficult for a wide variety of reasons, it may not be worth it to them.
Even if it was, it has nothing to do with why Microsoft dropped support for the Mac. The direction Microsoft is taking IE is different than the direction everybody else is taking web browsers. Microsoft sees IE as an application that will allow users to access both web pages and smart client applications.
They see the future as a mesh of standard web apps and smart client applications created with things like ClickOnce (at first), and eventually IE-hosted Avalon applications. (WPF.) Their hope is that eventually the line between web apps and client apps will blur, and since it will be (they hope) via IE and Avalon, it will draw even more people to using Windows since the UI/functionality experience is so much better than standard web applications. At least that's the business point of view.
His entire argument is predicated upon the false premises that Microsoft wants to support open standards and that they want to support the Mac.
Microsoft has virtually bottomless resources - if they really wanted to, they could crank out a secure cross-platform web browser that supported relevant standards. What Microsoft has is exactly what they want - vendor lock-in with a mediocre product that through its various 'feature-driven' incompatibilities gives them some sense of control.
If Mircosoft can't own the roads, they want to own the potholes.
Shall I start with the bit about how Microsoft has no reason to develop Mac programs anymore becuse they can just use the Intel-based versions? He seems to have forgotten that fact that the platform is more than just a processer archtecture, there's the OS API as well. It takes a lot of glue code to get an x86 Windows app to run on x86 Linux (and even then it's rarely perfect), and the same would be true on x86 Mac.
.NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
Then he goes off on the whole "Opera identifies itself as IE so we don't know how many people use it" bull that's been debunked over and over and over again. Opera IDs itself as IE in the same way that IE identifies itself as Netscape -- and for the same reason. If you're paying any attention at all, you can tell the difference.
Some examples:
Netscape 4: "Mozilla/4.7 [en] (WinNT; U)"
IE 6: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;
Opera 7: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.50 [en]"
You'll note that IE spoofs Netscape, that Opera spoofs IE (including the Netscape spoof), and that all three are easily distinguishable if you're looking in the right place.
Does this guy have a clue what he's talking about?
400 mil is an awful lot of money to fix a browser... For a 1/10 of that price, you could fix the current IE... Plus, MS has to save face here... Buying opera is as much as saying "IE is worthless, buggy, crap... we had to buy opera because it was just too bad to be fixed"... Not exactly positive PR...
MS: "Dear Jon, we would like to hand you 400 million dollars, cash, for Opera"
Jon: "OK"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on